


I’ll Be Under Your Stars (Forever)

by luninosity



Series: McFassy Regency AU [3]
Category: British Actor RPF, X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Autumn, Crunchy Leaves, Established Relationship, Kisses, Love, M/M, Music, Regency Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which James and Michael go for a walk, and Michael needs to make certain James knows how much he’s loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I’ll Be Under Your Stars (Forever)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [papercutperfect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/papercutperfect/gifts).



> For papercutperfect’s prompt for the McFassy Autumn Extravaganza: a walk through the autumn forest, confessions, and crunchy leaves under boots. (Happy birthday, also, love!) 
> 
> Title from the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Beautiful.”

The world grows vastly brighter day by day. Perhaps, James thinks, waking up enfolded in Michael’s arms and goosedown quilts and silken sheets and sunshine, this is a consequence of being in love. Of knowing beyond a doubt that that love’s returned.  
  
He catches himself smiling at random moments. In the music room, scribbling notation on much-abused paper. On the Prince Regent’s doorstep, about to pay a morning call. Always, always, thinking of moss-grey eyes and long fingers and a wide heartfelt smile.  
  
The world also remains complicated. Nothing fundamental alters outside of their shared life; they might be in love, but that only forms their own personal universe anew. The war drags on. Society giggles and holds balls and celebrates the London Season and lavishes praise upon the musical talents of one James McAvoy, rather unexpected husband of Michael Fassbender, richest man in England.   
  
James is Scottish and brilliant and lovely, or at least Society’s settled on labeling him with those three characteristics these days; Michael is, if not a peer of the realm, controller of most of the wealth within it. The very same papers that once mocked their hasty arranged marriage now celebrate it. Michael’s no longer a fool for having wed an impoverished Highland squire’s son; now he’s a genius, investment paid off once again, struck gold with the operettas and librettos and complex scores James composes for the Royal Opera, for private performances for the Prince Regent, for lords and ladies who delicately offer patronage, with funds, for his services arranging the music for their next ball.  
  
James, being paid by the Duke of Wellington’s staff to funnel any monies earned toward the war effort, laughs. And then stops laughing, because it hurts, deep down inside. They don’t know. Not one of them knows.  
  
His sister’s married to a soldier. Not anyone grand, no commission, just battlefront fighting, harsh and raw and stripped of all dignity.  
  
His family’d been that hopeless, and Joy that much in love. And every morning he finds himself desperately scanning the papers: battalions lost, lists of dead and wounded, lives snuffed out like failing candles.  
  
Michael, who’s given funds and material goods and practical patriotism to the war effort, holds him when he wakes shivering from the clinging dark chill of nightmares. Dreams in which his sister’s husband—and his sister, who’d so devotedly fearlessly followed her man into battle—have both been killed and left unrecognizable on a battlefield, both of them gone, no faces left to be known, no place to return the bodies…  
  
Michael’s his rock. His anchor. Has begun bringing him hot chocolate and the pile of newspapers in bed, ostensibly borrowing the financial section but not actually reading, only holding James’s hand and sneaking glances filled with concern.  
  
Michael loves him. It’s a steady conflagration through the fear.  
  
He’s done the best he can in the three short weeks since his commission with the Home Office. He hosts theatre evenings at their London home. Promises subscription balls and writes new music for them. He’s managed to compose a waltz that, being just slightly too fast and sweetly promising in the music, offers everything sought-after society belles wish from their beaux. He’s currently the fashion, in fact.  
  
Even more currently, they’re on a walk, just him and Michael. Out amid the blustering winds and tumbling autumn leaves and crunching ground beneath their feet.  
  
They’re at one of Michael’s—no, no, _their_ —country estates. James tells himself to start, to continue, thinking this way.   
  
It’s difficult despite his determination; it’s only been three weeks since Michael’s real proposal, not the one their parents’d arranged, but that glorious extraordinary shining moment in the music room when Michael’d knelt at his feet and said, I never really asked you, you deserve better, you deserve a proposal from someone who loves you, I’m asking you now…  
  
Michael’d suggested they have a not-precisely-honeymoon-journey in the country. James had agreed. He’d spent too long feeling unwanted in the cold walls of London; here, with Michael’s devouring lips and the enticing rustles of tree-branches and the delicious howling of the wind, he can curl into Michael’s warmth unreservedly at last.  
  
He can even compose. As he’s doing now, considering the chatter of the breeze, the quick bright crunch of their steps over scattered leaves, gold and scarlet and crisp and sharp and muted in a way that only autumn can achieve, dying falls and rich earth and bonfires and the end of harvest sharp in the air.  
  
Michael’d inquired, that morning, watching James watch the drift and tumble of the leaves, whether he’d like to go for a walk. To explore the very limits of this estate.  
  
They’re moving side by side, easy lift and swing of legs. He times the rhythm in his head: one-two. One-two-three-four. A waltz? No. Something different. Sensual. Aware of the closeness of bodies. Hearts.  
  
His footsteps, along with Michael’s, crinkle pleasantly over the carpet of leaves. Crush ruby and gilt and paleness into the dry brown ground.  
  
He thinks about the piano, the luscious antique instrument he’d fallen in love with at Michael’s London townhome. It’d been in desperate need of tuning; it had, he’d thought, been grateful. Appreciative.  
  
Sometimes he wants to weep, waking in the night. And then he feels Michael’s warm hands on his skin, hears that Irish-soft voice murmuring, it’s all right, you’re safe, they will be safe, anything, everything we can do…  
  
The Fassbender estate bleeds ships and transports and medical supplies. It’s all the influence he could’ve ever dreamed of holding.   
  
His fingers itch with the need to touch keys. To hear the embodiment of the notes he’s imagining: vivid and rusty and slow and drifting, autumn in a tune.  
  
He tests different weight, stepping over spent-artillery leaves. Susurration. Snap. Shiver. If he touched the keys there…and also _there_ …the hint of breaking bone, the quick crack of ending hope…but real, and present, and there’s hope in _that_ , there’s a tune…  
  
He feels Michael’s warmth beside him as an intrusion, at first, and then as a sudden welcome shock: yes, this, reality.  
  
“James…” There’s wistfulness in that Irish-accented voice, a catch like unvoiced longing. “Will you speak to me, at all, on this walk?”  
  
“Oh,” James says, startled by the naked want in the words, and looks up, taking Michael’s hand in his. “Of course. I was only thinking. I might try an operetta. A ghost story, full of the whisper of leaves…sorry, I’m here, what were you asking?”  
  
Michael’s fingers wrap around his with a strength that does more than hint at desperation. “You’re beautiful, when you’re thinking…the way your eyebrows draw together, the way you smile, like you’re seeing something no one else can…I want to kiss you.”  
  
“You can,” James agrees happily, “and also you make me sound rather insane, making faces, seeing nonexistent creatures—”  
  
“Astonishing,” Michael interrupts in a tone that brooks no debate, and then pulls him close and kisses him firmly, fiercely, as if with enough passion he can keep them entwined in each other always. James, still half-lost in piano notes and rippling breezes, hasn’t quite caught up to why Michael feels the need for demonstrations of boundless passion at this specific second, but isn’t complaining.  
  
He parts his lips and leans in and up and kisses back, cool autumn crispness and shared heat between them; slides his hands around Michael’s waist and up to caress the lean planes of that broad back, loving the way muscles tense with desire at his touch. Michael buries hands in his hair and forcibly tips James’s head for better access, growling a word that might be his name or _love_ or _need you_ ; James sighs and shivers and melts into those hands as Michael presses kisses into his throat, destroying his already poorly tied cravat in the process.  
  
Michael’s teeth nip lightly over the pulse-point, and he gasps; Michael, somewhat disconcertingly, stops at the noise. James, panting and alight with need and now very confused, gets out, “What—why—please—” which is about as much vocabulary as his brain is capable of handling.  
  
“James,” Michael whispers, gaze resolute and heated, green-grey as stone and as grave, “I love you.”  
  
“Of course you do,” James answers, bewildered, and decidedly aroused, frustrated, and concerned. “I know that. And I love you.”  
  
“No, I mean…” Michael’s hands are intent, cradling his face. James can’t look away, and doesn’t want to. “I _love_ you. I know I can’t make up for—for months of neglect—so quickly. I know I’ve hurt you, and you’ll say we’re happy but that sort of hurt—that doesn’t simply vanish all at once. So I need to tell you again. Every day. I love you, and you’re brilliant, and I promise to sit through all your opera ghost stories, forever. I can—”  
  
“Michael,” James jumps in, his turn this time, because Michael’s not wrong but there’re other words that need to be said, “it’s a love story.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“The operetta, the idea I was working out…I said it was a ghost story. It’s also a love story. About being together, regardless of life or death or—or anything really. Forever.” At this inopportune instant, a leaf falls out of the sky and lands on his head. He sighs, an attempt to sum up the entirety of his emotions in one wordless sound. Why is _now_ the moment when the season chooses to mock his height and his hair?  
  
But Michael reaches over and finds the leaf, cradling it in one hand as if it’s more precious than all the jewels in the Fassbender coffers. “A love story. You…want to write a love story?”  
  
“I’m living one,” James says, and tugs Michael back into his kiss, hearing the song in his head: glorious and triumphant and blurring into inexpressibly tender, kept for themselves alone. He knows he’ll never be able to recreate those notes, and he doesn’t care.   
  
This is about him and Michael, and how much he loves Michael. And when he murmurs “I love you” and Michael pushes him back against the closest gleeful tree and collects his hands above his head against the bark and gazes at him with incredulous worshiping eyes, it’s everything he’s never known he’s needed, the heartbeat of his—no, _their_ —forever, the happy ending he knows they’ll make come true.


End file.
